I'm not sure about the UK, but in the US cops are trained to notice everything.
I have so much crap in my car that they wouldn't even notice a dead cop on my floorboard.
You (and the investigating policemen) must have pretty badly block sinuses (euurgh!)
actually I find it a lot easier to drive on cobbles at higher speeds, because then your suspension doesn't really get a chance to travel, and the ride is smoother:)
Seriously though, since the car's suspension is probably acting like a low-pass filter, travelling faster over cobble stones would move their effect into higher frequencies and so would tend to be filtered out.
Of course, then you just have to contend with the dips/bumps that have a longer wavelength becoming more of a nuisance so you're probably still out-of-luck 8-D
The doug anthony all-stars cover with Barry Crocker was not too bad. Barry: "ooooooo, and it makes me wonder." DAAS (aussie bloke chorus voice): "and it makes Barry wonder."
/me checks that it's not a public place and the video camera is off... Barry: "cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.." DAAS-Tim: Barry's right. There are many words have two meanings. They're called synohomonies. Richard, what's an example? DAAS-Richard: Well, there's the word there for instance, as in: 'Isn't that their house, over there?' There's two uses for the one word, Tim. DAAS-Tim:Certainly is. And there are many other words that have two meanings. Like hump, shag, root, pork"
Given that (a) My brother has a Mac (so USB drivers might not exist) and (b) my parents had an "ancient" laptop (now deceased) at the time,
they might still only have had the option of ethernet anyway. I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised that there was the choice.
Speaking of reading it, I found with Firefox the text kept disappearing after a couple of seconds. I ended up (eughh!) having to use the "open page in IE" extension.
Has anyone else had this problem or is it just me?:-(
The brain is not the same for a seven year old and an adult. Children are not just mini-adults. There brains work differently, depend on different processes, employ different strategies. For example, a seven year old does not have mature frontal lobes which is important in accessing consequences.
I'd like to mod this up but the mod point cupboard is bare, so instead...
Just to add to this, if Roger Penrose's theory is right ("The Emperor's New Mind"), then the brain relies on quantum level changes when making decisions. It would seem, therefore, impossible to completely record the state of a brain given the fact that we can't know everything about quantum states.
To actually pull this off in a (relatively) safe manner, you would have to:
1. use a small bank of ultra-capacitors at the house/station that fills itself up over a more reasonable time (preferably off-peak)
2. use a bank of ultra-capacitors (not 1 big one) in the car
3. use a bank of smaller, more managable cables, bundled in such a way as to reduce magnetics and single short catastrophe
4. develop a standardized end-point connector assembly that:
Or alternatively, why not have a standard cartridge for the capacitors so that all you do at the 'filling' station is swap a (partially) discharged unit for a fully charged one? The station could (pardon the pun) charge you for the difference between the energy levels in the returned unit and the supplied one.
The thing about ray tracing is that it's the archetypal embarrassingly parallel problem that makes heavy use of floating point arithmetic. The thing about GPUs is that they are incredibly parallel processors optimised for for floating point operations.
It's not just the sheer number of FP calculations that can be the problem. Once you get away from the first (or perhaps even second) level of rays, you end up losing coherence between neighbouring rays which causes memory page/cache thrashing. This is not a nice thing on a GPU.
I think every other "moon" has an gravitational center within the parameters of the planet. Charon is the only case, so I agree Charon and Pluto should be considered "binary planets".
But isn't the Moon's distance from Earth slowly increasing thus, surely, the binary planet definition will also apply to the Earth+Moon eventually?
1. They must meet emission standards. European diesels currently can't be sold in the US as they are in the UE because our standards are much tougher (believe it or not).
2. They must be sexy.
Presumably, if you just want to a car to meet emissions ("zero") and be sexy (e.g. be related to the Lotus Elise), you could go for the Tesla? That's if you can get hold of one.
You are assuming that they understand American whats its instead of the distance and speeds that the rest of the world uses. Any one care to translate them to metric so that our new machine overlords have an easier time?
Well, the vehicle is British so the speeds would be in MPH but the fuel tank size would be measured in litres. Wonderful consistency for you:-)
not to mention wind turbines take up tons of space, slaughter birds, and are eyesores
Excuse me for being a devil's advocate, but I've often heard that claim that wind turbines are giant poultry food-processors and wondered about it.
Birds also fly into windows and kill themselves (presumably the reflection confuses them), yet you don't hear complaints calling for the building industry to stop installing windows* **.
(* computer industry, maybe)
(**Of course, if they did, that would half-solve your "eysore" problem 8-P )
Call me a noob, but does anyone have any idea how much resolution the human eye can detect (per some unit of area, of course)?
I can't give exact figures but Glassner's "Principles of Digitial Image Synthesis" has an excellent chapter on the eye/brain behaviour. It includes a diagram that shows that the resolution is at a maximum around the "central" viewing axis and then decreases as you get to the periphery. We can also see higher resolution in vertical and horizontal directions than in diagonals, and it also varies with differing light intensities.
Of course, there is also the blind spot in the eye where we don't see anything but the brain automatically fills that in for us.
I didn't know what it was either but Wikipedia does have some simple descriptions which I'll try to summarise.
In a nutshell, and assuming I've understood it, if you just consider a normal sphere, then it has a 2D surface. That surface is "simply connected" which appears to mean that if you take any two points on the surface and join them, then you can (smoothly) transform that joining "curve" into any of the other possible joins between those chosen points. Basically, there are no holes.
If you then go up to the next dimension (a 4D sphere?), which I guess means the "surface" is 3D, does the "simply connected" property still hold?
It's been a long time since I did maths at Uni so take with a grain of salt!
Typical Linux whine.
No where in this annoucement do they say that they are releasing Picasa as open source software. They do allow use of it free of charge.
Software developers are really in a bind with Linux. If you don't create software for Linux, Linux people whine that you are not supporting them.
Create software for Linux, Linux people whine that its not open source.
Actually, it sounds like there should be enough to even stop the latter from moaning. According to the WINE home page:
Google just released Picasa for Linux..... Interestingly, there's some technical details available about how the Linux version came to be. The port was done using Wine and in the process over 200 patches were contributed back to the Wine project.
The issue is not externally generated noise but thermal noise in the sensor itself.
The issue now, apparently, is that the geometry is so small that the number of photons landing on an individual sensor, in a typical exposure, is tiny and, since they arrive randomly, you don't get a chance to get an accurate average.
If they submitted the patent before Apple started using the disputed aspects of it, then how is it a submarine patent? A submarine patent is one that's submitted, granted...
No, I believe you are incorrect.
My understanding is that, before the US cleaned up their patent laws, a submarine patent was one that was filed but not granted. The old laws allowed a patent to be tweaked multiple times effectively delaying the grant pretty much indefinitely. An unscrupulous person/company could thus tune a patent to cause the most havoc when he/they effectively chose to get it granted.
Thankfully, the USPTO is a bit more like the rest of the world so this practice should now have stopped.
20 minutes to remove the laptop from the bag, smash the window and pound on the steering column with it? They must be using those modern, fancy-pants, lightweight laptops. In the old days we could get a car in under 5 minutes with a Mac Portable.
Seriously though, I heard that with one recent car (possibly a BMW) all the thieves had to do was give it a big enough jolt (something like lifting it up a little and dropping it) and it would think it was in an accident and automatically unlock all the doors!:-(
Please explain how an electric car can take energy from chemical to kinetic to electric to chemical to electric to kinetic and possibly be more efficient or cleaner for the environment than a gas car.
Electric cars don't burn energy while sitting at traffic lights.
And, furthermore, you can use regenerative braking to recover some of the vehicle's kinetic energy when you put your foot on the brakes (rather than just dumping it into the disks/drums as heat).
Slashdot Mirror
I quite like Terry Pratchett's twist on this:
"Do you want it fast or cheap or good, gentlemen? The way things have gone, I can only give you one out of three."
(from "Going Postal").
Seriously though, since the car's suspension is probably acting like a low-pass filter, travelling faster over cobble stones would move their effect into higher frequencies and so would tend to be filtered out.
Of course, then you just have to contend with the dips/bumps that have a longer wavelength becoming more of a nuisance so you're probably still out-of-luck 8-D
Barry: "cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.."
DAAS-Tim: Barry's right. There are many words have two meanings. They're called synohomonies. Richard, what's an example?
DAAS-Richard: Well, there's the word there for instance, as in: 'Isn't that their house, over there?' There's two uses for the one word, Tim.
DAAS-Tim:Certainly is. And there are many other words that have two meanings. Like hump, shag, root, pork"
Given that
(a) My brother has a Mac (so USB drivers might not exist) and
(b) my parents had an "ancient" laptop (now deceased) at the time,
they might still only have had the option of ethernet anyway. I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised that there was the choice.
Speaking of reading it, I found with Firefox the text kept disappearing after a couple of seconds. I ended up (eughh!) having to use the "open page in IE" extension.
Has anyone else had this problem or is it just me?
Just to add to this, if Roger Penrose's theory is right ("The Emperor's New Mind"), then the brain relies on quantum level changes when making decisions. It would seem, therefore, impossible to completely record the state of a brain given the fact that we can't know everything about quantum states.
Or alternatively, why not have a standard cartridge for the capacitors so that all you do at the 'filling' station is swap a (partially) discharged unit for a fully charged one? The station could (pardon the pun) charge you for the difference between the energy levels in the returned unit and the supplied one.
It's not just the sheer number of FP calculations that can be the problem. Once you get away from the first (or perhaps even second) level of rays, you end up losing coherence between neighbouring rays which causes memory page/cache thrashing. This is not a nice thing on a GPU.
But isn't the Moon's distance from Earth slowly increasing thus, surely, the binary planet definition will also apply to the Earth+Moon eventually?
(* computer industry, maybe)
(**Of course, if they did, that would half-solve your "eysore" problem 8-P )
I didn't know what it was either but Wikipedia does have some simple descriptions which I'll try to summarise.
In a nutshell, and assuming I've understood it, if you just consider a normal sphere, then it has a 2D surface. That surface is "simply connected" which appears to mean that if you take any two points on the surface and join them, then you can (smoothly) transform that joining "curve" into any of the other possible joins between those chosen points. Basically, there are no holes.
If you then go up to the next dimension (a 4D sphere?), which I guess means the "surface" is 3D, does the "simply connected" property still hold?
It's been a long time since I did maths at Uni so take with a grain of salt!
Thankfully, the USPTO is a bit more like the rest of the world so this practice should now have stopped.